"Rules and Regulations" Sculpture and Photographs by Marc Berghaus
Exhibition: October 18 – November 30
Reception: October 22, 7 – 9 p.m.
Image: Marc Berghaus "Rules and Regulations #2", 1999 91"hX48"wX 39"d Steel, fiberglass, glass, brass, electric motors, water, betta fish. (Twenty-one electric motors slowly move 53 small brass fish in circles in their glass cubes. One live betta fish swims happily in single water-filled cube in figure’s hand.) Photograph by Doug Koch
Marc Berghaus was born in Meade, Kansas, in 1966, the son of Dean and Kay Berghaus who farm and ranch there. In 1985 he came to Lawrence to study at the University of Kansas, a course that was interrupted from time to time by changes in major, a bicycling trip through Europe and time off to work. In 1991, he completed a degree in East Asian History.
In 1992, Berghaus began creating sculpture, a way it seems, to integrate his facility with materials, his active imagination and his searching curiosity. "These sculptures", he says, "are the by-product of prolonged spiritual questioning." Since that time, Berghaus has developed a large body of complex kinetic sculpture that has been shown regionally in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado and New Mexico. The exhibition at the Lawrence Arts Center will be his first solo exhibition in Lawrence.
About the work Berghaus says, "The first thing to be said about these pieces is that almost all of them appear in my mind, at random, and I just build them. The ideas pop into my head at odd times, usually in completed form, although nearly every piece goes through some form of change before its completion. My job, then, is to make what I have seen into an actual object. This consists of realizing the dimensions into wood and metal, and, if light or movement is involved, figuring out and building the necessary electronics and mechanics. I almost hesitate to call these ideas "mine" because I don’t know exactly where they come from, and there is very little conscious design in the original ideas."